The Conversational Nature of Reality (David Whyte)

 

David Whyte

The Conversational Nature of Reality

One of the things the Irish say is that “The thing about the past is, it’s not the past.” [laughs] It’s right here, in this room, in this conversation.

Of course, my work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I call “the conversational nature of reality,” which is the fact that we don’t get to choose so often between things we hope we can choose between.

Yes, I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was really interested in the way that the “I” deepened the more you paid attention.

I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself — and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.

I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved. So one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death of the periphery, the outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your personality and where you think you’ve been building who you are, starts to atomize and fall apart. It’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off or the television or not look at our gadget — is that giving over to something that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with and lead to your demise. The intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading toward your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get corroborated very much in our everyday outer world.

 This piece is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind myself what’s first order. We have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze or the ground beneath our feet. This is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again. It’s called “Everything is Waiting for You.”

Your great mistake — Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone. Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone. As if life / were a progressive and cunning crime / with no witness to the tiny hidden / transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny / the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, / even you, at times, have felt the grand array; / the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding / out your solo voice. You must note / the way the soap dish enables you, / or the window latch grants you courage. / Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. / The stairs are your mentor of things / to come, the doors have always been there / to frighten you and invite you, / and the tiny speaker in the phone / is your dream-ladder to divinity. / The tiny speaker in the phone / is your dream-ladder to divinity. // Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation. The kettle is singing / even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots / have left their arrogant aloofness and / seen the good in you at last. All the birds / and creatures of the world are unutterably / themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.

Ms. Tippett:

I love that line, “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

Mr. Whyte:

Half of all human experience is mediated through loss and disappearance. 

Ms. Tippett:

I sense all the way through your writing, in your poetry, in your other writing, you — I’ll say it this way: There’s this sadness in you. It’s in all of us, but you walk with it as a companion, I think, more openly than we’re taught to do. Perhaps that’s also something that poetry allows.

You and I both loved John O’Donohue, and I think we also both love Rilke. And Rilke talks about loving the “dark hours of his being.” I just wanted to note that. I appreciate it, and it’s also one of these things about what you bring into the world that is — I know people recognize it, but it’s also a little bit frightening.

Mr. Whyte:

Yes, and I describe it more, from my own experience, as wistfulness and poignancy, a kind of elegiac approach to life. An elegy, a good elegy, looking at it from the poetic point of view, is always a conversation between grief and celebration. The grief of the loss of the person and the celebration that you were here at all to share the planet with them, you know?

This is another delusion we have, that we can take a sincere path in life without having our heart broken.

When I went full-time as a poet, I was only a year into it, and I spoke in Washington, D.C. at a large psychological conference. At the end of the conference was this line of people, and at the end of the line was a man who, in best American fashion, said, “We have to hire you.” And I said in best Anglo-Irish fashion, “For what?” [laughs] He said enthusiastically, “To come into corporate America.” And I said, “For what?” And he said a marvelous thing, actually. He said, “The language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered. And in your work, I’ve just heard the language that’s large enough for it.”

But actually, there’s a form of youthfulness you’re supposed to inhabit when you’re in your 70s or your 80s or your 90s. It’s this sense of imminent surprise, of imminent revelation, except the revelation and the discovery is more magnified. It has more to do with your mortality and what you’re going to pass on and leave behind you, the shape of your own absence.

There are these lines from “Ten Years Later,” your poem: “Innocence is what we allow / to be gifted back to us / once we’ve given ourselves away.” 

I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid-40s or 50s — “Oh, I am actually going to die. It’s not someone else I’m going to become.” But another step of maturity is actually realizing the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go [laughs] — that you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up and make way for something else, which you’ve actually beaten a trail for. And it could be your son, your daughter, could be people you’ve taught or mentored; it could be — the more generous you are, the more that circle extends into our society and those who go after us.

Well, I always say that poetry is language against which you have no defenses. Otherwise, it’s not poetry. It’s prose, which is about something.

“Vulnerability.”

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

“The House of Belonging.” But these last lines I wrote down: “This is the bright home / in which I live, / this is where / I ask / my friends / to come, / this is where I want / to love all the things / it has taken me so long / to learn to love. // This is the temple / of my adult aloneness / and I belong / to that aloneness / as I belong to my life. // There is no house / like the house of belonging.”

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn // anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.

Sweet Darkness

“When your eyes are tired / the world is tired also. // When your vision has gone / no part of the world can find you. // It’s time to go into the night / where the dark has eyes / to recognize its own. / It’s time to go into the dark / where the night has eyes / to recognize its own. // There you can be sure / you are not beyond love. // The dark will make a home for you / tonight. / The night will give you a horizon / further than you can see. // You must learn one thing. You must learn one thing. / The world was made to be free in. / You must learn one thing. / The world was made to be free in. // Give up all the other worlds / except the one to which you belong. // Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn // anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.”

It’s really working with that earlier dynamic we worked, of incarnation, of becoming visible in the world. And yet the gift that you’re going to give and keep on giving is an invisible gift that will take many different forms and that you learn more of each time you allow it to take a different form. You move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another larger form for it or a different shape that makes a different connection. And then you deepen it in your 40s. And you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s. And then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s. This is the gift that keeps giving, and it’s that internal, deeper source. It’s you becoming more and more real and more and more visible in the world.

John used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

There’s this kind of weighted silence behind each question. To live with that sense of trepidation — what I call beautiful trepidation — the sense of something about to happen that you’ve wanted but that you’re scared to death of actually happening. [laughs] None of us really feel we deserve our happiness.